Today, we are celebrating Get to Know Your Customers Day, observed annually on the third Thursday of each quarter. It’s a day to reach out to your customers and get to know them better. Email marketing is not only a great way to communicate with your customers, but it is also an important tool for gaining valuable insight about your customers — who they are, and what they need from you.

Some marketers make the mistake of thinking that email is a broadcast-only marketing channel. They line up their campaigns, hit send, and then wait for the orders to roll in. Ironically, this limited, one-sided view of the technology demonstrates just how effective email marketing is: Even when marketers don’t follow best practices or optimize their email marketing activities, it still works!

But it’s worth remembering that at its best, email marketing is more than just a send. It’s a major part of forging a relationship with your customers and prospects and, by doing so, a way to make better business decisions that revolve around solving problems and providing meaningful engagement for your subscribers.

Email is a two-way communication technology. When a subscriber surrenders their email address to your list (either via a purchase or by completing a subscription form), they are giving you permission to contact them with relevant, engaging information. They are doing this because they wish to form a mutually beneficial relationship with your organization. In life, you probably already know that one-way relationships don’t work. In business, it’s pretty much the same. As with any other relationship, you have to take the time to listen if you want to nurture a profitable partnership.

Every email marketing send represents an opportunity to start a brand new conversation, or continue an existing one. Subscribers will quickly lose interest in campaigns that constantly bark instructions, or yell, “Sell, Sell, Sell!” On the other hand, they do respond when they are being heard on a personal level.

We always recommend using email marketing as an opportunity to ask questions, share opinions, and solicit replies. Alongside the standard email marketing metrics like opens, click-throughs, and conversions, every single engagement in the email marketing process will tell you something about your customers — if you are willing to listen.

We’ve taken the listening process even further at iContact, with our Voice of the Customer program. We invite our employees to attend bi-weekly meetings to listen to customer support calls and participate in a Q&A discussion. Getting to know our customers better — what they are saying, what challenges they are encountering, what outcomes they are trying to accomplish, and how we help meet their needs — allows us to find better ways to help our customers get the most of their investment in our products. Simply put, knowing our customers makes us better email marketers and product developers.

Solve Problems by Listening

We often say the best marketers use their campaigns to help solve their clients’ problems. Listening is a big part of this process. Knowing how and why a subscriber joins your email marketing lists, understanding what words and phrases in your subject lines generate the most opens, and understanding how your creatives and calls-to-action (CTAs) drive the most profitable engagements, is all vital and readily available information that will help you make more informed marketing decisions.

For instance, your email subscriber list growth yields important insight on whether you are producing content and promotions interesting enough to increase the rate at which you are growing your subscriber list.

Do you have a high open rate, but a low number of clicks? That means you are grabbing your subscribers’ attention enough to open your emails, but not providing content or offers interesting enough to act on.

Even the “negatives” in email marketing campaigns can tell you a lot about your subscribers. If you launch an email marketing campaign and get a resulting large number of unsubscribes, that probably means that your topic or theme may not be what your customers are looking for; or perhaps, you are emailing them too much and you need to adjust your frequency to better suit customer preferences.

Doing something as basic as testing a couple of different subject lines can give you insight into what your customers respond to or want. Testing different promotions or discounts can tell you at what price point a great offer is really a great offer to them. It just takes a little effort to examine the data and then use that information to put a more effective marketing plan into action.

All of these email marketing metrics can help you form an overall better picture of your customers and your buyer personas. Knowing what works — or doesn’t work – for your audience, will allow you to make better decisions about your marketing strategies and email campaigns. (You can learn more about the metrics that matter, for holiday marketing campaigns and beyond, in our blog post.)

How Technology Helps You to Become a Better Listener

Because marketers are busy people, they often feel like they cannot afford to spend the time listening and engaging with their customers. This is just one of the many reasons why advanced marketing automation technologies can make a huge difference in getting to know your customers and cultivating ongoing relationships.

Instead of blasting everyone on your subscriber list with a one-size-fits all email, regardless of their interest or relationship with your organization, advanced list segmentation allows you to easily personalize and send the right message to the right person at the right time. Hofstra Law, an iContact customer, is a great example of how taking information captured with a sign-up form – like students’ names, email addresses, campus event, initial meeting date, and the year they plan to enroll – segmenting their email subscribers, and personalizing communication, can make a huge difference.

Using their list segments, Hofstra Law customizes their communication and lets automated workflows do the rest. Instead of just blasting out an all-purpose email asking prospective students to apply to Hofstra Law when they might still have two years of undergraduate studies left, the school sends a targeted email to these students thanking them for stopping by an information booth and letting them know the next time there will be a campus event. That email begins the conversation and sets the groundwork for continuing a relationship with the law school. Students who are choosing a law school soon, receive an email directing them to specific landing pages offering free webinars or brochures to learn more about the program, and including details on how to apply.

This kind of targeted personalization helps Hofstra Law stand out in a very competitive environment. Getting to know their audience with email marketing not only aids the listening process for the law school, but amplifies every engagement they have with a prospective student. Hofstra uses email marketing to show students that they care about them – the school values the relationship, they know where students are in their decision-making process, and they know how Hofstra Law can help them. The result? A much higher engagement rate with prospective students.

Amplifying conversations is important because sometimes your customers’ engagements can be very subtle. Are you capable of identifying a buying signal from a series of seemingly unconnected clicks on a number of campaigns across multiple mediums? Probably not.

With a little careful planning, based on your understanding of your clients’ needs, marketing automation helps steer your conversations until an appropriate moment, such as when a product or service is recommended, a human being takes over the conversation, or a sale is made. Then, the technology can help you keep the relationship personal and ongoing.

It is said that we have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Email and marketing automation technology ensures that both of your ears are in listening mode and your “mouth” is engaged at the optimum moment.

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